On 6/29/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: I'm not arguing against that. Though it should be STRONGLY prefered that people find the citation themselves, if they so care. that a phrase containing weasel words is marked Change weasel words. THIS IS A WIKI. and that a word with a spelling error is marked Fix spelling errors. THIS IS A WIKI. Are you seriously advocating that a spelling error should be marked with a footnote *instead* of being fixed? How else would the reader know there is something wrong with the text? Because the reader is not an idiot.

The Cunctator schreef: I'm sorry, no, I think I was a bit too sarcastic. One reason these tags may be necessary is because talk page don't work as good for these issues as a few years ago. It used to be that if you saw a problem with an article that you couldn't immediately solve yourself, you'd leave a message on the talk page: "Look at that sentence, it doesn't sound right, does anyone have an idea how to improve it?" It used to be that only a small fraction of our articles had talk pages. If I came across an article with a blue link to the talk page, I always took a look; sometimes there was an interesting didcussion, sometimes just a cleanup notice. Nowadays, 90% of our articles have a talk page, and 80% of them are empty.[*] Eugene [*] I've got the talk page header boxes and the wikiproject pages turned of in CSS as well. I wish that that would make red links of talk pages containing boxes only...

The Cunctator wrote: His solution may be off, but he does have a point in identifying a problem. Using the talk pages for some kinds of meta data tends to detract from using them for discussion. Ec

On 29/06/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: The problem is, the metadata is useful. It's not simply useless fluff, so writing it off as a stupid idea or something to get rid of is a bad move. Well, it *can* be useful, anyway :-) It's certainly a lot better than it was a couple of years ago, when we just had "project banners" - now there's actual embedded metadata there, information about the quality of the article or about certain fundamental aspects of it ("is about a living persion" being perhaps the most useful); thanks to these templates we're beginning to have some kind of an idea of what our overall status is. It's fragmented, but it's improving. It went on the talk page because everyone accepted it couldn't go on the article, and the talk page - the meta-page devoted to that article - seemed the obvious place for it. If you want to get the talk page "back", we need to find some place to put article-specific metadata and keep it accessible - nuking it won't help anyone. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

on 6/29/07 8:40 PM, Garion96 at garion96(a)gmail.com wrote: I like this idea. As the number of Projects grows, so will the number of templates. This would free up the Discussion Pages for just what their name describes: Discussion. Marc Riddell

On 6/30/07, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk> wrote: Who wouldn't claim Beethoven if they could? I only put plants tags on botanist and plant articles--but putting them there is good, because there are two editors who go through and clean up technical aspects of these articles and a handful of others who copyedit articles that have been recently tagged with WP Plants, so the tags serve a pupose--but, yes, a dedicated templates page would be good. KP

Marc Riddell wrote: Now I love this idea. It's very frustrating to go to a talk page to participate in the discussion how to improve it, only to find that the "discussion" consists of a bunch of bot-placed (or effectively bot-placed) templates.

On 6/29/07, SPUI <drspui(a)gmail.com> wrote: Some folks did listen, now the templates can be closed, and must be clicked on to open all of them--this means that folks can see that it is a talk page. It's a good point about the project banners. Maybe there should be a project banner page in addition to a talk page. KP

On 6/30/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote: I like Kingboyk's suggestion on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Avoid_using_WikiProject_talk_pa… (last section). Make the discussion tab a different colour if there are only pointless (definately POV here) templates on the discussion page. Garion96

What do these templates do that couldn't be done with categories? (And when are categories and other such metadata going to be separated from the article source code and given a real interface?)

I don't see the point in most cases. I mean, the majority of talk pages I've seen only have 1 banner. In cases of 2+ though, I think you're on to something... User:Giggy On 7/12/07, quiddity <blanketfort(a)gmail.com> wrote:

The Cunctator wrote: For some idiots it's important to have historical knowledge of the fact that the page at one time contained a spelling error. It's the only thing that stands between them and "Delete, nn." :-) Ec

On 30/06/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Which is, as I understand it, the reason that [[WP:AWW]] exists in the first place.

On 6/29/07, James Farrar <james.farrar(a)gmail.com> wrote: Just edit the freaking sentences, already. I do adore the irony that Allen's sentence in support of the {{who}} tag used the "some have determined" construct.

Todd Allen wrote: Maybe some of these comments were simply made by Weasel on Wheels. :-) Ec